I shrug a little, as if she might have a point, but I’m not willing to concede it.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? That you have a right to say no to the pool—you don’t need excuses, reasons, arguments, though in fact, you have them. What you want, or don’t want, is as important as what your husband and children want or don’t want.”
“Yes, but there are four of them who all have rights, too, don’t they? Why should my rights supercede theirs?”
“Well, they can easily live without a pool, can’t they? Now, tell me the truth, Teddi, can you as easily live with one?”
CHAPTER 18
I am waiting for Rio to get home from work. He is usually in a good mood on Mondays because my father is off, which leaves him the run of the store. Only tonight he comes home in a foul mood. Bobbie and I watch him grimace at the hole in the backyard and the lack of progress that is being made on the pool that Joey’s company is putting in. There is a bulldozer and something called a Cat, but the bull appears to be dozing and the Cat isn’t digging any holes, either. Neither has shown any signs of life for several days. The surface dirt has dried and blown around in the light breeze, coating and recoating the new deck furniture with a film of dirt despite how many times I wipe it down.
Just inside the back door, Rio slips out of his dusty loafers, grimaces at them, too, and glances at the empty stovetop.
“So as usual, there’s no dinner?” he asks, opening the oven door and peering into the oven. How long can a person keep the same expression? “We gotta get some help in here, Teddi. Someone to do the cleaning, some cooking. Angelina’d be happy to—”
“I thought you said this morning that you wanted to go out for dinner tonight,” I say, ignoring the comment about Angelina and the dirty oven. “Remember, you said you wanted to try that new Italian place on Cold Spring Road?”
“How about you giving us a little privacy, sweet cakes?” he says to Bobbie, signaling with a jerk of his head that it is time for her to leave.
“I thought that Bobbie could come out with us,” I say, but Bobbie is halfway out the door, making excuses about having to call the kids at camp and trying to make it look like Rio isn’t throwing her out.
“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” I tell him after she leaves.
“Yeah, well, my day wasn’t what you’d call nice, and now I get home and there’s no dinner.” He looks at the oven again as if dinner is going to magically appear there.
“You said you wanted to go to that Italian restaurant that serves family-style,” I remind him.
“Okay, sure. If that’s what you want,” he says, pulling out a chair at the table and sitting down in it.
“I was going to make chicken, remember?” I say. “But I had to go visit my mother, and you said—”
He looks at me as if the conversation never took place. As if he never wanted to go out to dinner.
Maybe it never happened. He looks over at the clock on the oven. It reads 3:10. He checks his watch, then looks at the microwave. It reads 7:40. “What the hell time is it, anyway?” he shouts, pressing buttons on one clock and then another. “How do you stand this? It’s enough to drive even a normal person crazy!”
“Blew a fuse,” I explain. It happens all the time. For the better part of a year, the VCR has been blinking 12:00, along with the clock on the answering machine. At least those two agree and are right twice a day. Actually, it doesn’t bother me at all. I find it easier to get used to it than to run around fixing the clocks every day in the summertime, when storms and air-conditioning sabotage the house’s electrical system on a regular basis. It’s the price you pay for having five televisions, four VCRs, two DVD players, TiVo, Replay and digital Cablevision in a house that was built when a typical family owned only one TV.
“Where’d you go today?” he asks me, taking my hand in his and stroking it idly, as if he is trying to make a connection of some sort. As if we need that.
“Just to visit my mother,” I say. “My father was there, and David, and—”
“Ah, the Golden Boy,” he says, interrupting me. The subject has been a prickly one since I confronted Rio about not telling me my brother was in town. “Back just the way your father planned it from day one. I’ll bet that was one touching scene.”
I tell him that the “touching” part involved Angelina’s mouth and my father’s privates, apparently witnessed by a pubescent David. While my parents and I were horrified by David’s revelation, Rio seems to find it pretty amusing. This is because there are three things that Rio thinks he has known about my father from the start: (1) that my father was fooling around with Angelina since forever, (2) that he has been waiting for David to come home and take over the reins of Bayer Furniture, which would effectively cut Rio out of the picture, because (3) my father hates him. The world according to Rio.
So despite the fact that my father hired Rio, that we have lived off Bayer Furniture for all these years, and that there was no way my father could have known that David would resurface, Rio has been waiting for this betrayal to happen for nearly as long as he has worked at Bayer. He doesn’t seem to get it that my while my father might betray him, he would never betray me.
Of course, now that I know he’s betrayed my mother, I stand on less solid ground on that one.
At any rate, I don’t tell Rio how my mother told David and my father that he is anxious to welcome her here, that he’s already cleaned out Dana’s closet for her and that, unless Angelina is out of the house she shares with my father by the time she is ready to leave South Winds, she is coming home to our house.
We are on tenuous suspension bridges with fraying ropes as it is. There’s no point crossing any more of them until it’s absolutely necessary. Rio is happy enough to drop the subject of my family after looking upward and muttering pazzo! loudly.
“Go anywhere else?” he asks.
South Winds was more than enough for one day. I tell him that I came straight home.
“So then you went to the bank on the way there?” he asks. “Or you don’t want to tell me about that little stop?”
It’s true. I’m guilty. I deposited a check from Precious Things, where they paid me for the camp trunks and nightstands and an incredible floor lamp with Alice in Wonderland’s neck stretching up nearly the length of it. And I did a quick withdrawal at the ATM on the way to the hospital. Get the cuffs. Book me.
“And the bank,” I admit readily. “And I also went to the bathroom twice and stopped in Home Depot Expo to look at kitchen curtains for the window that faces the yard. It’s all in that gizmo you got me, if you want to check. Or maybe we could get me one of those cute Martha Stewart House Arrest bracelets to wear.”
“Don’t start with me, Teddi. Not when you’re the one in the wrong. You gonna tell me what you’re spending all this money on?” he asks, pulling a folded piece of paper from his pocket and smoothing it out on the table. “Is all this for that damn bat mitzvah, or what?”
“All what money?” I look at what appears to be a fax from Roslyn Savings Bank. Insufficient Funds.
“You know, you want to spend it all on this little party, Teddi, you go right ahead. My future, our future, what does it matter, anyway, right? But you gotta shell out the money two years in advance? I guess you think it’s fair since your father’s only keeping me on because of you, and he wants this thing to be the party of the century. So even if I’m the one working my ass off down there in the heat because the air-conditioners are too old to do squat…
“Anyway, you can spend it on whatever you want, but there is a limit to it, you know. And I can’t replace it if I don’t know it’s not there or nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” I have taken out exactly sixty dollars since the kids left for camp. And I put in several hundred, which more than covered that.
“Twenty-one hundred and sixty dollars, Teddi,” he says, laying his hands palms up on the table. “That’s what I’m talking about. And it don’t g
row on trees, you know. Ask your father. And how come it’s gotta be cash, two years in advance? They need two years for the damn check to clear?”
“Are you accusing me of taking out twenty-one hundred dollars?” Okay, I may have made two withdrawals and not just the one I remember. It’s been more than a week since the kids left, and Bobbie and I have eaten a few lunches out and picked up a lipstick or two.
“No, I’m saying you took out twenty-one hundred and sixty dollars, but the sixty was from your own account, so I got nothing to say about that. But the three seven-hundred withdrawals were from our joint account—an account without twenty-one hundred dollars in it,” he says. He points again at a fax on the table. “See here? June 28, seven hundred dollars. July 2, seven hundred dollars. July 6, seven hundred dollars again. How long you think you could keep taking money out before I noticed?”
“Oh my God,” I say, panic rising as if I’ve got three kids in the car and the LIE has just turned to a sheet of black ice. “It must be one of those bank frauds. Someone must be looting our account.”
“Right,” he says, clearly not buying my explanation. “Look, I’m sorry if I acted, you know, mad. I know I’ve been dumping on you about this whole bat mitzvah thing, but what does a goy know about chopped liver swans, anyway?”
“Rio, I haven’t put down that kind of money on the bat mitzvah. I haven’t put money down beyond the deposit, and that was done a long time ago. Which is all beside the point, because I did not take out that money,” I say.
“Oh,” he says knowingly. “I get it. You don’t remember taking the money out.” He says it amiably, almost with a wink.
“No,” I repeat. “I am not demented, and I’m not careless about money. At least not about that much money. Someone is looting our account, Rio, and it isn’t me.” It happens all the time—isn’t that why I gave in and changed my PIN? As bad as it is, I like that explanation better than the one Rio seems ready to accept.
“You didn’t maybe give it to Bobbie?” he asks, tilting his head as if he’d understand if I did. “And not tell me ’cause you thought I’d be mad?”
After I assure him, swear up and down that I haven’t taken out a dime from our joint account, never mind twenty-one hundred dollars, he agrees to call the bank as soon as it opens in the morning.
“Didn’t you tell me you changed that PIN thing?” he asks. When I nod, he asks if I told anyone and I tell him not even him, and before I can tell him the new PIN he says, rather dubiously, that someone must have taken a ‘damn lucky guess.’ He puts his hand up to stop me when I try to tell him what it is, saying he never uses the machine. Then he stands up, ready to go out to dinner as if it’s settled.
“This place you wanna go to take credit cards?” he asks, fingering the Insufficient Funds slip on the table.
“I still have some cash,” I say. “At least I think I do.”
“You ready to go then?”
I nod, grabbing up my handbag.
“Fine,” Rio bites out as he puts his arm around my shoulder and leads me to the door. “This oughta be great.”
CHAPTER 19
“And so I open my wallet in the restaurant,” I tell Dr. Benjamin between sniffs. “And there it is. Twenty-one hundred dollars. Hundred dollar bill after hundred dollar bill.”
She pushes the box of tissues closer to me and I take out a couple more.
“How could a person not know that she took out all that money? How could I not remember that? And then, of course, I went into my whole ‘somebody else did it’ mode. I told Rio I thought my father had come into my house and put the money in my purse. Only I know he didn’t do it because when I brought up money, he offered to send home five hundred dollars with Rio as if it were a king’s ransom.”
“What about Rio?” the doctor asks.
“Don’t you think I thought of that? I thought of Bobbie, of my mother—whose locked in South Winds, for Pete’s sake, and naturally Rio. I’d have accused the milkman if we had one. I even thought of David.”
She asks me who David is and that leads us down the Oh-Didn’t-I-Mention-He’s-Back Alley, which the good doctor refers to as Omission Street. When I admit it’s unlikely that David took the money out of my bank and put it in my handbag, she seems willing to let the David story occupy a back burner for a while.
“You know how to tell if a paranoid woman has esteem problems?” I ask her.
She gestures for me to tell her.
“She thinks nobody important is after her.”
She ignores my joke. “You ruled out your neighbor and your husband, then?”
“This is great. You’ll love this. You know my crazy mother. Well, her friend was the victim of computer theft and my mother was so sure that I would be next that I had to promise her I’d change my PIN number, which I did, last week. She says that you’re supposed to change it every month or so. She saw it on Prime Time or Dateline.”
“And?” she asks. I can see that she is at her wit’s end. I passed mine a long time ago.
“And so no one knows the new PIN. I can hardly remember it myself without looking it up. And I had the money, after all. And I was at the bank those days. I checked it in my Palm Pilot, but I swear I was only making deposits. I mean, I could swear, but then I’d be wrong, wouldn’t I?”
She makes some sympathetic noises while she jots some things in my file. She shakes her head as if it doesn’t make any more sense to her than it does to me. At least, she tells me, I remember going to the bank. It’s a relatively small thing, she says, to forget a second transaction. Well, actually it isn’t, but she apparently is willing to make excuses for me.
“Are the sleeping pills helping you?” she asks, grasping at straws. “Are you sleeping well?”
“Like the dead,” I say.
She nods, like we’re making progress.
Maybe she has time for these games, but I don’t. “Okay, look,” I say, leaning forward in my chair. “I’ve come to you for one of two reasons. Well, really one reason, but there are two ways to get there. Either you can simply tell me I’m not losing my mind, which is what I want to hear, or you can fix it so that I don’t lose my mind. Either way works for me, as long as I can have my life back.”
“Okay. You’re not losing your mind,” she says, and flips my file closed. “I’ll have my service send you a bill.”
“What about what’s happening in my life? What about how I can’t remember—”
She sits back in her chair, as if she has all the time in the world and whether I stay or go doesn’t make a bit of difference to her.
I hate it when she does this.
“I know what you’re doing,” I say, copying her posture, settling in.
“And what is that?”
“Manipulating me. You’re hardly the first person to do that.”
“Be nice if I was the last, though, wouldn’t it?” she asks, giving me that little Team Teddi smile.
I take a long time to answer and surprise both of us by saying that maybe it would, and then again, maybe it wouldn’t.
Her jaw drops slightly and she asks, incredulously, “You like being manipulated?”
“It saves making mistakes,” I say, defending myself reflexively. “I mean, if I’m doing what is expected of me, then everyone around me will be happy, won’t they? And if they’re happy, then I’ll be happy. So, in essence, doing what they want me to do is the surest way to find happiness, isn’t it?”
She says nothing. Okay, so maybe I’m not happy at the moment, but maybe it’s because I don’t know what everyone wants of me. My God, is that the person I have become?
“It’s not like I have no will of my own,” I continue in the wake of her silence, unsure where I am going with this. “It’s that what I want never seems as important as making everyone else happy.”
When she still says nothing, I charge on. “Okay, like I’m going to see my mother. She hates when I wear overalls. If I wear them, anyway, she’ll complain and critic
ize and I’ll be miserable, so I’m actually making myself happy by pleasing her, right?”
“And your pool? You’re telling me now, honestly, that you’re making yourself happy putting that in? Which one of us, exactly, are you trying to convince?”
“How come the only time you talk is to say something mean?”
“Because you’re up to it, Teddi. The more we talk, the more I see you getting in your own way, setting limits, relinquishing authority to anyone around you. And here you are, at it again, coming to me to tell you that you are normal, when you already know that for yourself, don’t you?”
“Maybe you’re right. I do relinquish authority. At least I did. I went from my father’s house to my husband’s. But it seems like everybody I’ve trusted to take care of me has let me down. Look at my father, my mother, Angelina. And now Rio thinks I’m losing it and he can’t stop it.
“Do I know I’m normal? I don’t know.”
“I’ll help you Teddi, in every way I can, but you’re a grownup now. You don’t need someone to ‘take care of you.’ You’re the one with the keys. You’re the one in the driver’s seat.” She is nearly pleading with me. “Drive, dammit, Teddi. Drive.”
“I’m trying to,” I tell her. “That’s why I’m bringing my mother home to my house.”
“Despite my reservations?”
I tell her that I feel I have to, for my sake as well as hers. “If she’s there, I can’t very well fall apart, can I? I have to be strong for her, and have a normal life going on, and show her that I am…”
“…nothing like her?” Dr. Benjamin asks. “Teddi, people aren’t meant to live with their mothers once they’re adults. Even under the best of circumstances. If, for example, my mother moved in with me, an hour would be too long for both of us.”
“I can do it,” I say, and she looks at me as if she’s seeing that poor wounded psyche, the one with the broken leg and the limp arm and the knife in her back that she told me I was, only now she sees that there’s a ball and chain attached to my good leg. “It’ll be good to have the company.”
Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 14